The Inner Green

Most of the interesting books to be found on the subject of home and place, where we live and how we relate to it, are American, but The Inner Green (Maa Press), is a collection of natural history and personal essays by K. Linda Kivi and Eileen Delehanty Pearkes about the place they live: the Columbia Mountain ecosystem in B.C. This book is about things that matter. It’s beautifully produced, it has been polished until the writing sings and one can refer to it whenever one wants to remember some interesting fact about cedar bugs. It’s about trees, squirrels, mountains, salmon and other inhabitants of a particular ecosystem, an amazing part of the world that is really an island in the mountains bounded by the Columbia and Kootenay rivers. The mountains, the natural diversity, the distance, the closed-in valleys in winter—all have contributed to a culture where people live out their dreams in various, often eccentric ways. The book provides an antidote to alienation and a glimpse into what it can mean to form a profound relationship with a particular place. (Maa Press, 1-4925 Marello Road, Nelson, B.C., Canada, V1L 6X4.)